"One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, with each new place less stimulating than the last. When the children acted out, Chuck spared not the rod. (He was also suspected of being closeted: in the early Sixties, a family friend claimed to have seen him cruising in a public restroom.) For her part, Bea had already had a baby with her stepbrother when she was fifteen; her parents covered it up by claiming the child as their own. She had a weakness for amphetamines, often chain-smoked in front of the television, and was twice committed to mental hospitals. Robert once found a suicide note she’d left in the family car. His older brother Charles went further than that; he tried to kill himself by guzzling furniture polish when he was in his late twenties. Charles got beat up a lot in high school and liked to smash bottles and slash tires; he never moved away from home and spent his last decades heavily medicated, before taking his own life in 1992. Sandra, one of two sisters, married a close friend of Robert’s named Marty; when she became pregnant, she supposedly told Marty, in Nadel’s words, that “she’d fucked everyone, including the pizza delivery boy, and wanted a divorce.” (Robert experienced his first orgasm while wrestling Sandra when they were teenagers.) Carol, the other sister, seems to have led a comparatively quiet life and keeps to herself. Finally there’s Maxon, the youngest brother, an epileptic who refused to treat his seizures. When he wasn’t assaulting women, he embraced asceticism. “Every six weeks since the late 1970s,” Nadel writes, “he has passed a twenty-nine-foot strip of cotton through his gastrointestinal system, in the mouth and out the anus, a cleansing that takes about a week to complete.”
That passage from a review of the new book Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life in the current issue of Harper's.
Jordan Peterson referred to the 1994 documentary Crumb as a portrait of a sexual predator. I'm not entirely sure if Peterson was talking about R. Crumb or his brother.
ReplyDeleteIntrigued, I watched the film. I never cared for Crumb's style, but he and his whole family were profoundly broken people dangerous to everyone around them.
Jordan Peterson says a lot of stuff, most of it pulled from his butt. But... broken clock and all that. Still appreciate the art, if not the artist.
DeleteR.Crumb was really fun to read when he started out in underground comix - Zap, etc., in 1969 and 1969. When he started drawing more violence and doing weird stuff to women, he quickly got much less interesting.
ReplyDeleteI saw the Cheap Suit Serenaders live a couple of times in NYCity. While interesting to see and hear, they picked a certain genre and the obscurest tunes from that to play.